These poems flow from reflection on the most fundamental issue in modern and contemporary thought: if, as our European-cultured inheritance teaches, the criterion of truth and knowledge is an interior feeling of certainty, how can we be sure the world exists independently of our act of knowing it? In the great tradition of the Romantic philosophers and poets, Blodgett answers "we cannot." To perceive is to create - and more: it is to speak, to shape with language.